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Process Monitoring with ps

Rather than being an interactive, real-time monitoring program such as top, ps works a lot more like ls (hence the name)—it's an instantaneous listing of all processes at the time you execute it. It provides all information that top does, as well as extra details about many of the values.

By default, if you run ps without any arguments, you will get a listing of only the processes owned by you that are attached to terminals (that is, those that have been run from a login session). There is a large array of command-line options that will give you more wide-reaching results, and each can be found documented in man ps. Specify these options as follows:

# ps -waux

This combination of options shows the output in wide format ...